Saving Seafood

Tagged and Tracked: Mapping the Journeys of Pacific Cod in the Bering Sea

June 16, 2026 — Pacific cod support Alaska’s second largest groundfish fishery and play a critical role in the Bering Sea ecosystem. In recent decades—particularly from 2017 to 2019—the Bering Sea experienced unusually warm temperatures and minimal sea ice. These conditions appear to have shifted Pacific cod distributions farther north compared to colder years, raising questions about long-term changes in population distribution and demographic structure.

Understanding a Shifting Species

In response to industry concerns and scientific data needs to support management, a research team launched a satellite tagging study in 2019. Led by Dr. Susanne McDermott—the Gulf of Alaska bottom trawl survey lead—the team included fisheries biologists Julie Nielsen, Kimberly Rand, and many others. McDermott recalled, “There was tremendous anxiety over what’s going on. Why are these fish in different places? Is this something that’s changing on a population level? Is this just the same population moving into different areas?”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

7 Ways El Niño and Large Marine Heatwave Could Affect West Coast Marine Species

June 15, 2026 — A large marine heatwave has bathed parts of the West Coast in very warm ocean waters over the past year, breaking temperature records in the Pacific. NOAA has also announced that El Niño has developed in the tropical Pacific and is predicted to intensify to a moderate or strong level this fall. El Niño represents another form of marine warming , though with different drivers and influences. The prolonged period of high temperatures could affect fisheries and marine life in the California Current that have already been buffeted by shifting ocean conditions over the last decade.

One factor may help dampen the impacts, though: The same strong upwelling of cool water along the coast that fuels the West Coast ecosystem with nutrients could help keep some warmer waters at bay, as happened in 2025.

We have seen these back-to-back heat events before. About a decade ago, a major marine heatwave known as “The Blob” began raising ocean temperatures off the West Coast, peaking in 2015. One of the strongest El Niños on record followed in 2015–2016, amplifying ocean warmth—as the current forecast predicts for the coming year. That was a worst-case scenario that drove changes around the world. The Pacific endured a record count of tropical cyclones and the Caribbean Sea and parts of Africa experienced severe droughts. That situation was more extreme than now, with the Blob lasting longer and affecting the entire West Coast compared to the smaller recent marine heatwave. However, research and observations during that unprecedented climatic pileup suggest the kind of changes we may see in the coming months along the West Coast. Though these changes are centered in the Pacific, they have far-reaching impacts.

Here are some of the ways warming water can impact marine life, coastal communities, and economies.

1. Shifting Fisheries

Research found that some commercial West Coast species, such as market squid, may be sensitive to these long-term and episodic changes in ocean temperatures. The shift of market squid north along the West Coast in response to warming from the Blob and subsequent El Niño created new fishing opportunities in Oregon and Washington during the Blob that remained afterward. Squid landings in Oregon rose from none in 2015 to nearly 3 million pounds worth more than $1 million in 2016 and continued to grow rapidly through 2020. This provided new opportunities for purse seine vessels whose opportunities in other fisheries affected by the Blob—such as sardine, Alaska herring, and Alaska salmon—had dwindled. Seafood processors in Oregon scaled up to handle more squid, and Oregon fisheries managers developed their first regulations for the emerging squid fishery. Market squid had been the largest commercial fishery by volume in California, but California landings dropped by more than half from 2014 to 2015. They remain substantially lower than they were prior to the Blob and El Niño.

Meanwhile, tropical species such as whale sharks and hammerhead sharks made northerly appearances off Southern California while fishing vessels caught albacore tuna much closer to shore as far north as Washington. Fishing boats caught a skipjack tuna off the Copper River in Alaska, and surveys turned up an ocean sunfish and thresher shark off southeast Alaska. Pacific bluefin tuna increased in number and size in U.S. waters, exciting recreational anglers and generating new revenue for the charter fleet. This year, Southern California anglers have begun catching dorado and yellowfin tuna much earlier in the year than usual, suggesting these northerly shifts may have begun.

2. Hungry California Sea Lion Pups

Higher sea surface temperatures also affect other fish species, including sardines and anchovy. These fish are high-energy staple foods for California sea lions that breed in Southern California’s Channel Islands, but declined with warming ocean temperatures. Sea lions turned to lower quality forage species such as rockfish and squid. Nursing sea lion mothers had to travel farther to find the food their pups needed, forcing pups to fast for longer periods at the rookery. The weight of sea lion pups declined, according to long-term studies in the Channel Islands . In El Niño years, many hungry pups set off on their own in search of food before their usual weaning time. In 2013–2016, as many as 4,000 pups arrived on California beaches, skinny and hungry. These extreme events taxed rehabilitation facilities and prompted NOAA Fisheries to declare an Unusual Mortality Event for the species. Researchers later estimated that an increase of 1 degree Celsius in sea surface temperatures could reduce the growth rate of the sea lion population to zero. A 2-degree rise would reduce the population size by about 7 percent.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

Alaska researchers using tagging data to reduce fishing bycatch

June 11, 2026 — A stream of data more than a decade in the making is helping a team of Alaska researchers’ efforts to boost the health of the local salmon population and the bottom line of fishing trawlers.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks research team has translated a trove of data from a chinook salmon tagging program into a predictive model that could help reduce bycatch by fishing trawlers.

Chinook salmon range from the ocean’s surface to depths where trawl nets target groundfish species. The researchers’ model uses more than 700,000 data points between Southeast Alaska and the Bering Sea to predict how chinook will be distributed across the water column. With that information, trawlers can potentially adjust their operations to reduce inadvertent salmon catches.

Read the full article at Peninsula Clarion 

Chinook salmon tagging data aims to help reduce trawler bycatch

June 11, 2026 — Fisheries scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are on a mission to find out where Chinook salmon are at all times, not to catch them, but to avoid them.

Their research draws on a trove of data from a Chinook salmon tagging program, with a focus on helping commercial trawl harvesters avoid the depths and areas where these fish risk becoming bycatch, and where they may also be adversely affected by naval exercises in the Gulf of Alaska used to train U.S. military forces for combat at sea.

Chinook and chum salmon have been hard hit in recent years by rising ocean temperatures, anthropogenic impacts, and increased microplastic pollution.

Bycatch limits already in place for declining Chinook stocks shut down the trawl fishery in Kodiak in 2024, when two trawl boats caught so many Chinooks over a single weekend that the entire fleet had to stop fishing, leaving most of their total allowable groundfish catch in the water.

Read the full article at the

Opinion: Fisheries need science, not opinions

June 10, 2026  — There’s an old saying that “when an argument depends on a lie, it’s the lie that’s doing the work, not the argument.” Lies work because they discard nuance, science and the complexity of issues to paint a clear narrative to further an outcome. Reading the recent op-ed (“Alaska’s ‘midwater’ trawl fleet needs to fish like one,” May 28) by a group of well-funded nonprofits, with 2024 revenue of around $87 million, it’s easy to see the power of such a narrative.

The inconvenient truth these NGOs wish to skirt is that the science is actually very clear: Habitat impacts from pelagic trawl gear are minimal, temporary in nature and well managed. Since 2005, managers have evaluated impacts on essential fish habitat, or EFH, in Alaska. These EFH evaluations are peer-reviewed by scientists every five years, and for two decades, the science has shown that the disturbance by all fishing gear is less than 5% in the Bering Sea and less than 1% in the Gulf of Alaska.

The science is also clear that where and how trawling occurs matters. While it is true that trawling can have a negative impact, the degree of that impact depends on the type of habitat, disturbance from storms and currents, and the design and use of the trawl gear.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Alaska’s board of fish restricted a commercial fleet to protect Western Alaska salmon. Then the AG stepped in

June 8, 2026 — Just as hundreds of fishermen begin pouring into the Aleutian Islands ahead of its most productive season, a conflict over restrictions on commercial salmon harvests has erupted.

After the Alaska Board of Fisheries passed restrictions on the Aleutian commercial fleet to protect salmon bound for Western Alaska spawning streams, Alaska’s acting attorney general, Cori Mills, invalidated the measures last month.

Now, subsistence advocates say they may try to win the restrictions back in a lawsuit against Mills.

The board’s new regulations, pushed by subsistence fishermen for years as Western Alaska salmon runs declined, would have shortened the number of days and the size of the harvest that commercial fishermen could make in the Aleutians, widened a regulated area, and added some restrictions on net depths.

The threat of a lawsuit follows the subsistence advocates’ attempt to re-implement the regulations ahead of the commercial fishery opener on June 6. The advocates tried to join a lawsuit originally filed by the commercial fleet and its allies that challenged the restrictions — but the judge threw out the suit on June 1.

Read the full article at KYUK

Loss of ocean monitoring could create fisheries blind spot

June 8, 2026 — The Alaska Marine Community Coalition is raising concerns over plans to dismantle much of the federal Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), arguing that the loss of long-term ocean monitoring could reduce critical information used to understand changing conditions in Alaska’s fisheries.

In a recent statement, the coalition said the National Science Foundation plans to remove in-water equipment from four of the five OOI sites over the next 15 months, including Ocean Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska, located roughly 620 miles offshore. The network has collected continuous oceanographic data since 2016, while Station Papa itself has served as one of the North Pacific’s longest-running ocean monitoring locations.

The coalition said the station provides information on deep-water temperatures, ocean chemistry, currents and biological conditions that help scientists track changes affecting species including salmon, halibut, crab and pollock.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Groundfish industry cleans 55,935 pounds of nets for recycling

June 8, 2026 — Four huge worn-out midwater trawl nets that in old times might have been buried in a landfill are instead being repurposed into usable new products and protection for Ukrainians from explosive Russian drones.

The efforts of over 100 volunteers from Seattle’s wild Alaska pollock catcher-processor fleet hunkered down in 80-degree heat at Terminal 91 on Thursday, May 28, offered both environmental and financial benefits to American Seafoods, Arctic Storm Management Group, Coastal Villages Region Fund, Glacier FIsh Company and Trident Seafoods, all members of the At-Sea Processors Association.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Area M salmon restrictions remain sidelines as subsistence groups weigh legal action

June 8, 2026 — As hundreds of fishermen prepared for the June 6 opener in Alaska’s Area M salmon fishery, a dispute over new harvest restrictions remains unresolved after Alaska Acting Attorney General Cori Mills invalidated regulations approved earlier this year by the Alaska Board of Fisheries.

The regulations, adopted in February after years of advocacy from Western Alaska subsistence users, would have reduced fishing time and harvest levels in parts of the Aleutian Islands fishery, expanded a regulated area and added net depth restrictions intended to protect salmon bound for Western Alaska rivers.

Mills overturned the measures on May 19, ruling that the board’s vote was improper following ethics complaints filed by the Aleutians East Borough and commercial fishing interests against several board members who supported the restrictions. After Mills’ decision, the commercial fishing groups and borough dropped their lawsuit challenging the regulations.

A subsequent effort by the Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association to intervene in the case was rejected by Anchorage Superior Court Judge Herman Walker Jr., though subsistence advocates say they may appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court or pursue separate legal action.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

ALASKA: New Requirements for Halibut Charter Fishing in Alaska

June 8, 2026 — The following was released by the NOAA Fisheries:

If you’re going charter fishing in Alaska this year, you’ll need a charter halibut stamp if you plan on bringing halibut home. 

New Halibut Stamp Requirements

Beginning in 2026, adult anglers fishing aboard a charter vessel need a charter halibut stamp for each day they intend to catch and retain halibut. This applies to fishing in International Pacific Halibut Commission regulatory areas 2C (Southeast Alaska) and 3A (Southcentral Alaska). If you are fishing without a guide, you do not need a halibut stamp. 

The stamps cost $20—your fishing guide will take care of this for you. All you have to do is let them know that you plan to keep any halibut you catch before you start fishing for the day. Some guides might bundle the price into the total cost of the trip, while others might charge separately for it. If you’re just planning to catch and release, you don’t need a stamp!

Read more about how stamp fees will support the charter industry